Apple's marketing has increasingly emphasised developer tools for example Xcode. From a developers Point of View (PoV), how does OS X application development and support translate into the real world? Does it compare favourably with other platforms?

Thanks for your time.

Apple does encourage people to develop software. All the tools you need come free with the OS. There is adequate documentation included for anyone to get started.

As far as development in general, you get the entire classic Unix toolchain for free, which is a major plus for a commercial OS.

Actual native GUI programming for OSX is not very compelling for cross-platform guys like me though. It's 2005 and they apparently have no answer for the C++ frameworks commonly used on Linux and Windows - either you use Carbon and suffer or you learn ObjC and lose your existing codebase.

Which cross-platform GUI frameworks are you wanting to use? All the big ones are available for OSX.

I was thinking more in terms of a native Apple one. In general people don't react well when your app requires 10 megs of Qt or GTK or whatever shared libraries so I usually build platform-native C++ UIs over a common C/C++ core codebase (Audio Overload's UI is MFC on Windows and GTK+/Glade on Linux). As far as I know there's not a similar solution on OSX.

Ah, OK - I see what you mean now. The closest thing would probably be PowerPlant X from Metrowerks, which of course isn't Apple-supplied.